Englanders and Huns: The Culture-Clash which Led to the First World War

By James Hawes

A completely fresh look at the culture clash between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe.

Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts.

But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy?

Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857205308

James Hawes

James Hawes is the author of the internationally acclaimed Shortest History of Germany. He has published a biography of Kafka (‘absolutely brilliant and utterly infuriating’ –The Guardian) and Englanders & Huns, the real story of the fatal Anglo-German antagonism (‘full of enlightening surprises’ –The Times).

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ENGLANDERS

AND HUNS

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2014 by James Hawes

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

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The right of James Hawes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85720-528-5

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-530-8

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To Karoline von Oppen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Heartfelt thanks to:

Andrew Davies, for a grand act of help quite literally incredible (by which I mean that the few people who know of it find it extremely hard to believe); John Holme, Tim Walton and Richard Percival for proving that in time of trouble, old friendships are priceless; Philip Pullman, for much encouraging warmth and practical support; Nick Cohen, for passing his intellectual mine detector over the most dangerous chapter; James Meek, for straight-talking advice on narrative structure; Dr Peter Thompson (Sheffield University) and Prof. Karen Leeder (New College, Oxford), for countless debates and acts of hospitality; Prof. Stefan Szymanski (University of Michigan) for suggesting the chapter on sport; Elke Bechthold, for material from her unpublished thesis; Dr Matt Fitzpatrick (Flinders University), for a discussion of Australian Germanophobia; Karl von Oppen, for conversations at his dinner table about Bismarck; lastly but firstly, my mother, Mrs Janet Hawes née Fry, who (apart from everything else) can read nineteenth-century German letters which entirely defeat me.

The following institutions, and the people named within them, have all provided help well beyond what might reasonably have been expected: Oxford Brookes University, and in particular Dr Simon Kövesi, and Prof. Anne-Marie Kilday for the sabbatical and funding; the Bonn City Museum, and in particular Dr Ingrid Bodsch, for all the time and help given to someone who approached them without introduction in pursuit of a case unknown to them; the University of Heidelberg Library, and in particular Anna Vollner, for so very kindly providing the illustrations from Kladderadatsch and Der Wahre Jacob; Simplicissimus.com, and in particular Dr Hans Zimmermann, for doing the same with that wonderful material; the staff of the Secret State Archive (GStA PK), Berlin for guidance through their labyrinth; the staff of the SCOLAR rare books collection at Cardiff University; and for many kindnesses, the librarians of Balliol, Worcester and Hertford Colleges, Oxford.

At Simon & Schuster, Colin Midson and Mike Jones had the bravery to commission this book on a rather scanty pitch, and Mike the patience to see it through; Jo Whitford coped remarkably with a horribly complex task and Juliana Foster saved me from many dreadful solecisms. My agent, Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein, was a rock throughout.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue: An Uncomfortable Excavation

Part One (1864): The Setting of the Terms

Part Two (1865–6): The Last Summer Before Bismarck

Part Three (1870–71): The Franco-Prussian War

Part Four (The 1870s): The Wary Decade

Part Five (The 1880s): Bismarck vs the British

Part Six (The 1890s): The Only Friend of England

Part Seven: Fear and Loathing

Part 8: The Last Decade of the Old World

Notes

Select Bibliography

Text and Picture Permissions

Index

PROLOGUE:

AN UNCOMFORTABLE EXCAVATION

No nation has ever been given so long to make so momentous a choice: by the time Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the line-up of the next major European war, its geographical flashpoint and the vast decision that would one day face Britain, had all been perfectly clear to thinking men for thirty-five years.FN1

The great question of our modern history is not how or why precisely this long-foreseen European war did indeed at last come about, but why Britain came to take the side she did, turning what would have been a relatively swift and comparatively un-traumatic victory for Germany and Austria-Hungary into that defining cataclysm of our times, the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War.

The trouble is that the facts in this case lie below what professional archaeologists – I was once one – call a destruction layer: one of those melancholy, and literally dark, lines in the earth which mark the violent end of a settlement, a city, perhaps an entire civilisation. In the case of the Great War the physical evidence of destruction is practically limited to that single, gigantic scar across northern France and Belgium, the Western Front, the most concentrated charnel house in all military history. But that was just the start. By the time the yet more terrible aftershocks had been visited on all Europe, the world of July 1914 was sealed off by a physical, cultural, and perhaps psychological destruction layer so profound that truth has simply yielded to myth.

Our current national myth about 1914–18 is that of the entirely meaningless, self-generating massacre, as seen in Oh! What a Lovely War or Blackadder, set off by a more or less random assassination, fought between rival European empires of more or less equal wickedness, run by generals of more or less equal inhumanity. This view has been taken up by masterful storytellers, for whom it has been pay dirt in the shape of tales like Birdsong, The Ghost Road and, most recently, that veritable tsunami of Great War schmaltz, War Horse. As the centenary of Britain’s most far-reaching decision comes around, we have become a nation which, rather than seeking the truth, and hence a possible lesson in it, likes nothing better than to drown the imagined sorrows of anyone we can remotely claim as a relative who took part in this allegedly pointless and unfathomable tragedy.

Our actual historians are not, of course, entirely blind to the obvious fact that Britain freely chose to line up against Germany. But their story, too, is fascinating for what it says about us today. They all seem to agree that things were essentially fine between Britain and Germany until at least 1890.¹ Then, so goes the tale, the unstable Kaiser Wilhelm II, having kicked out the cunning but essentially sane old Prince Bismarck, went into cahoots with Admiral Tirpitz, who, like him, had a bizarre love-hate relationship with Englishness.FN2 The two deployed Germany’s new industrial might to supercharge her previously almost non-existent navy. The Tirpitz Plan thus led – gratuitously, almost overnight and more or less all by itself – to Britain lining up against Germany: ‘Anglo-German hostility dates from its inception’ is the plain declaration of our greatest military historian, John Keegan.²

Since this thesis roundly blames the German leaders of 1897–1914, you might well imagine that it is a British version of the past. In fact, it was born in the 1960s in Germany, where it is now simple orthodoxy to see a Grab for World Power under Wilhelm II as the root cause of the War of the English Succession.³

The tale of Wilhelm, Tirpitz & Co. is comfortable to Britons because it clearly blames the Germans; it is comfortable to Germans because it clearly blames a certain kind of German – the scar-faced, sabre-rattling kind, who, like Prussia itself, quite simply no longer exists.

Blaming the Tirpitz Plan for everything thus preserves the idea, so fashionable in modern Britain, of a British Empire which was generally a Good Thing, if perhaps incompetently or pusillanimously run; and it preserves the idea, so essential to modern Germany, of a country whose naturally ‘Western’ path was deformed by the failure of its citizenry to resist a right-wing, war-mongering elite.⁴

In short, everyone today, in Britain and in Germany, and further afield, is pleased by a saga whose very modern moral rings out loud and clear, chiming so nicely with our happy view of events like the so-called Arab Spring: if only the Good Democratic People keep power away from the Bad Reactionary Cliques, all manner of things will be well and nation will speak peace unto nation.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with this comforting tale: that old devil, the detail.

One striking artefact lies in the Prussian Secret State Archives for 4 November 1899. At this time, virtually no one, even in Germany, had worked out the true extent or aim of Admiral Tirpitz’s plotting, but there he is, informing the Staatsministerium, the innermost sanctum of Wilhelmian decision-making, that ‘the present antipathy towards England is convenient for the strengthening of the fleet’. The gun could hardly be smoking more obviously: Tirpitz’s plan for a mighty German navy did not initiate popular Anglo-German hostility, but deliberately used it. As Christopher Clark puts it in The Sleepwalkers: ‘it was above all the sequence of peripheral clashes with Britain that triggered the decision’ (my italics).⁵ In short: the Tirpitz Plan only ever existed, and was only ever politically viable, because the Anglo-German rivalry had by then already begun to bite.

So this is the great question: when did that fatal sequence of Anglo-German clashes really start?

By 1900, the New York Times, which had no earthly reason to spin things, could see that feelings between the British and the Germans – not the governments, the peoples – were already almost out of control:FN3

Four years earlier, when the Tirpitz Plan had not yet even been devised, let alone undertaken, the same paper was already printing headlines like this:

A decade still further back, in 1885, the New York TimesFN4 was telling its readers about

Back, still further: in 1879 it was already being claimed in the German press that Britain’s underhand financial muscle was being systematically employed to thwart honest German enterprise in Samoa:FN5

Before that old chestnut of inevitable conflict due to capitalist rivalry is wheeled out, let’s see a couple of pictures which really are worth many thousands of words, from the early mid-1870s and from each side of what was then still widely called the German Ocean.

These pictures date from the 1870s – that is, from a time when not one of the stock explanations for the Anglo-German rivalry works. In Disraeli’s heyday, Germany could still not launch a serious ironclad without importing both design and technology from Britain (the flagship of her navy in 1878 had been built from keel to masthead on the Thames); Germany had still not even tried to get a single colony; and the balance of trade was still so massively in Britain’s favour that the only German export to Britain which anyone noticed was the Germans themselves, who came as political asylum seekers and/or cheap labour. Yet by then – as we’ll see – highly influential German media dons were telling legions of readers that their most profound enemies were these decadent, yet somehow still cunningly hegemonic Englanders, while the most respectable British journals discussed the chances of war with, and even invasion by, these brutish, yet somehow almost superhumanly efficient Teutons. The popular images were already in place on both sides: the Hunnish, jackbooted, spike-helmeted, clenched-fisted thug, and the slippery, cunning, inhumanly ravenous, Jew-ish octopus – the very same images, that is, which would appear again and again in the propaganda of the deadly century to come.FN6

So how far do we really have to go back? When and why did Britain and Germany really start to be so at odds?

Let’s start this uncomfortable excavation exactly half a century before the great destruction began. 1864: Wilhelm was a mere boy, second in line to the throne of one German state among many; Tirpitz was an obscure lieutenant in a miniscule navy; and Great Britain, the industrial, financial and naval hegemon of Earth, was, to her own amazement, on the verge of war with Germany. Not with Prussia: with Germany . . .

PART ONE (1864):

THE SETTING OF THE TERMS

If England is resolved upon a particular policy, war is not probable. If there is, under these circumstances, a cordial alliance between England and France, war is most difficult; but if there is a thorough understanding between England, France, and Russia, war is impossible.

Disraeli, House of Commons, 4 July 1864

Trouble in paradise

Britain in 1864 was as confident as America in 1994.FN7 The existential challenges of the previous decade were history: Russian ambition had been bloodily tamed in the Crimean War, India was once again firmly in British hands after the great trauma of the Mutiny and France’s brief technological edge in ironclad warships had been so comprehensively annulled that Lord Palmerston’s wildly over-engineered coastal forts (virtually indestructible, they may still be visited from Cork to Dover) were being called his follies before they were even finished.

There were problems on the peripheries, true: in Jamaica, General Eyre was putting down the rebellion with rather troubling zeal; the rambunctious Irish had bred a violent new group called the Fenians – or was it Feenians? Perhaps it derived from some classical Phenians? – and it seemed possible that the United States, now fully geared-up for war in body and mind, might be tempted to apply to the 49th parallel the same logic which it was remorselessly imposing upon the Mason–Dixon line.

But these were mere details, for mid-Victorian Britain was not only the richest and most potent country on Earth, it also had a matchless sense of how it had become so. Britons had a story about themselves like no one else had. The tale had been gloriously told them by Lord Macaulay, the great historian of British Progress.FN8 In 1864 they were, almost to a man, as convinced as Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 that humanity would soon universally choose the self-evidently superior British ways of personal liberty, constitutional reform and trade’s increase – prompted by a judicious dose of high-tech, low-risk military persuasion where necessary.

The finest proof of this muscular pudding lay in that vast new market which had been prised open by a short but fiery lesson in the reach of the British Empire and the inadvisability of trying to stem the inevitable march of free trade, even if it included opium.⁶

And what were the dangers of Europe in 1864? The answer is simple, though perhaps surprising to us, so lost has historical truth become in later myth: Britain was, as a speaker in the House of Commons put it roundly, ‘on the verge of a war with Germany’.⁷

The poor relations

It seemed ridiculous. Britain was used to looking at Germany as a sort of poor, backward and rather comic relation.

The word ‘relation’ is almost meant literally. Right up until 1914, the newspapers, essayists, cartoonists and even the topmost diplomats of Britain and Germany – men like Bismarck and Lord Haldane – often described the other nation in terms of more or less distant family. Terms like ‘cousins’ or ‘relations’ were common on both sides, even when – often, especially when – the subtext was by no means friendly. No one on either side ever spoke about the French or Russians in this way.FN9

The literal relatedness of the British and German royals was just the visible tip of this strange, deep and mutual feeling that Britons and Germans really ought to be like one another. This sounds very positive, but it also meant, of course, that if they weren’t, something was very wrong indeed: there is no fight like a family fight.

To Victorian Britons, Germany’s role in the future unfolding of the world was clear. She was to sort herself out, unite, and adopt the predestined British ways of her older, wiser and infinitely stronger relation. Protestant Prussia, Britain’s helpmeet in the epochal triumphs of 1759 and 1815, would presumably lead the way, but would then be peaceably merged into a new, British-style United Germany, run by a real parliament. This was the so-called Coburg Plan, beloved of the Prince Consort, himself, of course, a German. After his untimely death, the Queen clove to the Dear One’s vision.

At present, however, Germany remained a hopeless mess of tiny countries, like Thackeray’s comic Pumpernickel, scarce ten miles wide, with its absurd court, its gorgeous but entirely useless officers and its western frontier ludicrously bidding defiance to Prussia.⁸ This Prussia was the most go-ahead German state, but even Prussia was hardly respectable: The Times warned that marrying Albert’s and Victoria’s own daughter (another Victoria) to the Prussian Crown Prince was making a connection with ‘a paltry German dynasty’.⁹

If even the Prussian royal house was paltry, Henry Mayhew, co-founder of Punch, could only hope to make the poverty and backwardness of Germany in general imaginable to his readers by comparing it with that most irredeemably wretched of countries, Ireland:

Gadflies in summer never swarmed in such number about a dung-heap; nor vermin infested so profusely the rags of Irish beggars; such greedy parasitical animalcules were never seen in a magnified drop of dirty water; no insects at the time of a ‘great blight’ ever covered the land so thickly, or ravaged it so thoroughly, as the horde of petty swaggering bogtrotter potentates in this miserable, under-fed, and over-taxed – ground-down and used-up – ill-conditioned and well-plucked – luckless, lifeless, spiritless, hopeless, and penniless – befuddled, beleaguered, and benighted old Fatherland, or rather old Great-grandmother-land, of Germany.¹⁰

Many Britons, or at least many Londoners, saw the truth of this every day, because London was well supplied with Germans, drawn there by those simple but timeless dreams which still draw foreigners ceaselessly to London: freedom and money.

For most, then as now, it was simply money. Germans in 1864 were so much poorer than Britons that even if they were no longer sold en masse to the British Army, as they had been in the previous century (to the outrage of Irish and American patriots, in whose ballads the despised Hessian hirelings of King George III often figure), British employers could still draft them in another capacity: as cheap labour to keep costs down.

Karl Marx, himself of course a London German asylum seeker, and one kept from penury only by Friedrich Engels’s helpfully intimate connections to the evils of capitalism, fulminated against this example of mid-Victorian globalisation:

Defeated in England, the masters are now trying to take counter-measures . . . secretly they sent agents to Germany to recruit journeymen tailors, particularly in the Hanover and Mecklenburg areas . . . The first group has already been shipped off. The purpose of this importation is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLIES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery . . . No one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other Continental nations. And the newly-imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.¹¹

The idea that cheap German labourers outnumbered the workers of all the other Continental nations was not a fantasy of Marx’s. We can see this from a remarkable set of figures given in the Daily News:¹²

German girls, lured from grinding rural poverty by promises of respectable work in a London paved with gold, were always to be found selling themselves around Leicester Square. Ragged-trousered street-bands of German buskers were such an infestation that the authorities, besieged by complaints from Dickens and Carlyle among many others, tried to suppress them by means of the 1864 Street (Metropolis) Music Act. This failed to stop the impecunious brass players of Germany coming to Britain or entering – ultimate sign of assimilation – the unwritten dictionary of London rhyming slang (‘German bands’ = ‘hands’).

Britons at home thus came across Germans in various not very flattering ways and would have looked down with pity or irritation at yet another ‘thin, under-sized German lad such as we see every day in the streets’.¹³

These Germans, of course, had some attractive qualities. Their colourful, sentimental Christmas festivities, imported by the late Prince Regent, were just starting to really catch on. Some Londoners enjoyed watching, and even taking part in, their curious, quasi-military gymnastic displays. And they were the antithesis of the other great Victorian immigrant labour force, the Irish: though almost as cheap to hire, the Germans who came to London were good Protestants, famously sober, educated and respectful.

But the most agreeable thing to Britons about these poor, undersized, oppressed Germans was that they openly admired – adored! – the cousins who had so generously or conveniently found a place for them.

The Germans look up, the British look down

Everyone knew that the Good Germans longed simply to unite and to become like Britain. Their liberal politics was a direct import, stamped ‘Made in England’ for all to see, as was their progressive economics. The leading theoretical light of German liberalism was an old Etonian, John Prince Smith, who later embraced Bismarck as a Reichstag MP and who seems to have believed, in a way that put even Adam Smith to shame, that achieving universal free trade really was all that mattered in the world. Sometimes the imitation of Britain was literal and even illegal: Krupp, whose wares were later to become a byword for deadly German quality, at first tried to flog his inferior products by mendaciously labelling them ‘best English steel’.¹⁴

The greatest German novelist of the day, Gustav Freytag, a public liberal, had the hero of his Europe-wide bestseller Debit and Credit be a good man trying to become a British-style, English-speaking businessman, to the gratification of his decent boss, a man of ‘thoroughly English aspect’. Britain is the good foreign example in the book, which was a great favourite of the Crown Prince and Princess, whereas the French, Poles and Jews are bad influences on Germany.¹⁵ The future high priest of Anglophobia, Heinrich von Treitschke, at first looked up to Britain with wide eyes as the land where social castes had been overcome by a healthy, organic union of the aristocracy and the middle classes.¹⁶ Looking back, Treitschke wrote bitterly: ‘What German liberal did not, in youth, dream the splendid dream of a natural alliance between free England and a free Germany?’¹⁷

German liberals sometimes even felt more German in Britain than in Germany. In London, among other Germans and ‘surrounded by a bit of salt water’, a German might delight so much in true, free German living as to forget reality, ‘go down to the Thames, take a ship and journey across the green North Sea and so up the gloomy Elbe to Magdeburg, maybe even to Dresden, where he starts to speak openly – and gets thrown out of Germany again’.¹⁸

This love was so strong that in 1856 a still rather obscure conservative politician and newspaperman complained despairingly to a friend of the way the Germans seemed hopelessly at the mercy of cultural Englishness:

The stupid admiration of the average German for Lords and Guineas, the anglomania of parliament, of the newspapers, of sportsmen, of landlords and of presiding judges. Even now, every Berliner feels himself elevated if a real English jockey talks to him and gives him the chance to grind out the crushed fragments of the Queen’s English. How much more so it will be when the First Lady of this land is an Englishwoman?¹⁹

The trouble was that as the undoubted top nation, Britons took such adoration in their stride and, like most over-adored countries or beings, did not return the compliment. The Germans might be some kind of relations, but by God they were poor and stunted ones. Sir Robert Morier, the best-informed and best-connected of all Victorian British diplomats, and a deep lover of liberal Germany, tried to explain to Britons that his work was hamstrung by ‘the contempt for every thing German which is universally, in Germany, ascribed to all English statesmen’.²⁰

Britons’ ‘contempt for every thing German’. Here is a charge which will ring down the following decades. Forty years later, the British were still being begged by some of their more insightful compatriots to drop their ‘lofty superiority’ and ‘amused contempt’ for Germany.²¹ Why would England not treat Germany as a fully equal Kulturvolk? Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chancellor, von Bülow, as well as countless pamphlets and individuals, were still asking this question on the eve of 1914. One very informed Victorian observer spoke of ‘the infinite number of bad jokes perpetrated by English comic writers and artists between the years 1840 and 1866 upon German manners and customs, politics and characteristics in general. There is no offence that a North German is more prone to resent, and less inclined to forgive, than a joke.’²²

Clearly, being beastly to the Germans, or at any rate making fun of them and then accusing them of not being able to take a joke, was not born in the twentieth century and did not (sadly for profound psychologists) come out of deep fear or rivalry. Britons felt about the Germans rather in the way the French feel today about the Belgians: amusement at a harmless but ridiculous cousin. They did not dislike the Germans – they just could not take them seriously.

To moralising Victorians, it seemed likely that it was the Germans’ own fault that they were disunited, backward and poor: Britons were practical men of business and politics, whereas the Germans were – the PM, Lord Palmerston, said it himself – a ‘nation of damned professors’. The British thus showed Germans little respect, even when being a literal professor was exactly what was needed: the first German explorers in Africa, graciously permitted to accompany a British expedition at their own expense, knew themselves fitted by excellent German scientific education for the task, but found that ‘we, who risk our own fortunes as well as our lives, are acknowledged neither as member of this English expedition, nor as gentlemen, but merely as servants’.²³

The fact was that Britons simply found the Germans they met at home, political refugees or economic migrants, who looked up so openly, so hopelessly and with such theorising to Britain’s constitution, to her navy, and to her empire, rather absurd.

The other way that Britons met Germans made things even worse: you can hardly respect a nation of entertainingly backward locals and unctuous hoteliers. For our ancestors had a unique new national hobby – like many of their hobbies, it was later to become universal among prosperous folk – which they called ‘holyday-making’, and the main place they made their ‘holydays’ was Germany, whither (as the Standard put it) ‘transit is now so easy and expeditious that you may breakfast one day in London and on the following take your déjeuner in the Fatherland’.

The horrors of a German holyday

It’s very easy to imagine the way Victorian Britons were seen by mid-century Germans: all you have to do is think of the stock comedy figure of the American tourist in post-war Europe.

Beef-fed Britons were physically larger than poor Germans, they dressed themselves in bizarre travelling clothes – plaid trousers were inexplicably fashionable – and they all went around with exactly the same guide book, ‘the red-bound Murray’, which told them what to see and how to get there, and which could make or break hoteliers in a single season. It was famously quipped that Englishmen went to Europe with Murray to tell them what to see, and Byron to tell them how to feel about it. They were known to be the great internationalist traders of the world, and to care nothing about what they traded to whom, for their only religion was money.

They were also notorious for refusing to learn foreign languages. What was the point? All cultures were as one, language was just a tool for communication and trade, and since English was self-evidently the most useful language for that, it was ‘manifest that the time cannot be very far distant when other nations will be constrained to use it, for the mere convenience of intercourse with the rest; and, consequently, though Germans, French, and Russians may cling as hard as the Welsh and Irish to their ancient forms of speech, they are assuredly doomed to be extinguished by our own’.²⁴ There was certainly no point in learning German, which was spoken by no one outside Germany other than in Windsor Palace, and which was filled with ‘grammatical foolery and absurd inflectional differences’.

GERMAN WITHOUT A MASTER.

SCENE:—Raliway Terminus, Cologne.

English Tourist(ignorant of the German language):—Hi! PORTER, CAN YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

Porter:—NEIN, HERR.

English Tourist:—THEN CAN YOU TELL ME WHO DOES?

Britons’ sense of their own, and of their country’s, superiority was literally proverbial. According to an 1867 dictionary of German sayings, if you wanted another way of describing somewhere as heavenly, you might say, ‘Hier kann ein Englander England vergessen!’ (‘An Englishman can forget England here!’).

Most importantly for any tourist industry, Britons were rich – often in that new-rich way that was still rare in a continent where Money was still generally Old. They were also much fussier than Germans about superficial things like cleanliness and comfort, leading later nationalists to proclaim that when the English said ‘civilisation’ they meant ‘soap’ rather than real Kultur.

Murray’s omnipresent guide book gives its readers stark warning about what they can expect in this strange and backward land:

One of the first complaints of an Englishman arriving in Germany will be directed against the beds. It is, therefore, as well to make him aware beforehand of the full extent of the misery to which he will be subjected on this score. A German bed is made only for one; it may be compared to an open wooden box often hardly wide enough to turn in, and rarely long enough for an Englishman of moderate stature to lie down in.²⁵

Henry Mayhew, in our very year of 1864, struggled even to find words which could describe to his fellow Britons that horror of all inexplicable German horrors, that ‘huge, squabby-looking, flabby, bolster-like coverlet’ – the execrable duvet:

The natives sleep in cribs but little bigger than orange-boxes, where sheets and blankets are unknown and where each individual slumberer has to roll himself up in the superincumbent feather-bed to prevent being left in a state of Adamhood during the night.²⁶

Coleridge himself declared that he ‘would rather carry his blanket about him like a wild Indian, than submit to this abominable custom’.²⁷

And then there was the all-pervading smoking of Germany:

When they were not being downright beastly, even the grandest of locals were objects of mockery for rich, modern British tourists:

It requires a somewhat lengthy residence in the country before you can make out whether the kellners at the principal hotels are, one and all, grand dukes of the farm-yard principality, or the Grand Duke himself one of the expensively-got-up gentry to whom you have lately given some five groschens as drink-money upon settling your account . . . In appearance this small mole-hill despot is as about as dignified as a linen-draper’s shopman in the British metropolis, delighting to wear the turban cap known as the pork-pie hat, which at the time of our quitting London was popular with every cheesemonger’s apprentice.²⁸

The pride of these wretched German nobles astonished well-off but untitled Britons. Sabine Baring-Gould waxed indignant at their feudal snobbery in 1879:

An Englishman is somewhat impatient to find barons abroad as thick as blackberries and looking equally ragged . . . I have known a lady refuse to allow her daughter to dance with sons of some of our first county families, and heirs to baronetcies, because they bore no von before their surnames and therefore could be no gentlemen.²⁹

The proudest state of Germany was of course Prussia, which Britain had vastly strengthened in 1815 by presenting her with parts of the Rhineland.FN10 Despite this friendly diplomatic history, Prussia proper was simply not on the British itinerary. After all, one guide book warned that ‘the traveller arriving here for the first time feels as if he had left behind him everything that gives charm to existence’.³⁰ And as for Berlin itself, the Saturday Review of October 1865 gives scant encouragement to the Victorian city-break traveller, being at first quite unable to find words sufficient to express its scorn:

Few English travellers whom neither public nor private business deprives of their freedom of choice are in the habit of losing their way to the City of the Plain, the oasis of stone and bricks in a Sahara of sand. Those who have been